Dated? Perhaps, But His Insights Remain Powerful

By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN

Published: July 29, 2000

How quaint the literary criticism of Lionel Trilling can seem, now that successive waves of structuralism, deconstruction, cultural studies, postcolonialism and other literary technologies have transformed university departments of literature. It has been a quarter-century since Trilling died, and more than a half century since he published ''The Liberal Imagination,'' his first collection of essays -- and most important book. Who now would think to write essays called ''Art and Neurosis'' or ''Manners, Morals and the Novel'' -- except to question whether the words ''art,'' ''neurosis,'' ''manners,'' ''morals'' or ''novel'' have any permanent meaning?

In fact, in the 1940's, when Trilling first became a prominent intellectual as an English professor at Columbia University, the most fashionable approach to literature was known as the New Criticism. It boasted an abstract, furiously modern vision: each literary work could be analyzed without reference to the author, his life or time. Criticism was to become a science. Trilling insisted on just the opposite. Criticism, like literature, had to engage with the full mess of human life, most notably the customs and beliefs we call ''politics.'' He got more than he bargained for: politics can now seem to be a main point of literary studies.

In a new collection of essays about Trilling -- ''Lionel Trilling and the Critics: Opposing Selves'' -- even the editor, John Rodden, acknowledges that for many contemporary readers Trilling may seem ''little more than a curiosity of literary history, a period piece.'' His prose style can only accentuate the impression of things long past: it is almost baroque in its winding, hesitating, qualifying, venturing gestures. The words ''variety,'' ''difficulty,'' ''modulation,'' ''complexity'' abound. Each phrase is limpid, but the arguments themselves are tentative, often ambiguous.

So faded has his intellectual aura become that it provides no immunity from the recent biographical accounts by members of his family. His widow, Diana Trilling, in her 1993 memoir, ''The Beginning of the Journey,'' recalled his anguished depressions, petty squabbles and nasty outbursts. In the journal The American Scholar, his son, James Trilling, recently suggested that his father's behavior and intellectual style were consistent with a psychological diagnosis of attention deficit disorder.

Yet Mr. Rodden's anthology reminds a reader that Trilling was complicated enough to be hailed by such disparate figures as Edmund Wilson and Irving Kristol. A second, more significant, new anthology, ''The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent,'' edited by Leon Wieseltier, shows just how much is at stake. It is the most capacious and pungent single volume of Trilling's work ever published, with writings spanning his entire career: classic essays on the Kinsey Report, on Wordsworth, on Jane Austen and on Kipling. It also includes Trilling's magisterial discussion of Henry James's novel ''The Princess Casamassima.''

What gives these pieces enduring importance is not Trilling's judgment that the Kinsey Report fetishizes science or that Kipling gave nationalism a bad name. The essays' subjects really were occasions for Trilling to brood on much larger themes that, far from being dated or quaint, have lost none of their urgency.

''The Liberal Imagination,'' for example, was partly a critical response to the Stalinism that tinged the era's liberalism. But in the book's influential preface Trilling uncovered deeper tensions within liberalism itself. One of the great achievements of modern times, he suggested, was the liberal conception of humanity: the view that there were universal and inalienable human rights, and that the powers of reason could both honor those rights and eradicate the world's evils.

The problem, Trilling went on, was that liberalism, in its search for freedom and justice, had to exert power; it required legislation and organization. Stalinism was an extreme oversimplification of liberalism, one in which the social engineering was ruthless. But even democratic liberalism, Trilling believed, exhibited a simplified view of the world and an unwavering conviction about how the world might be regulated. Since these qualities of simplification and certainty were themselves illiberal, the enlargement of freedom risked producing a contraction of freedom. ''Some paradox of our natures,'' Trilling wrote, ''leads us, when once we have made our fellow men the objects of our enlightened interest, to go on to make them the objects of our pity, then of our wisdom, ultimately of our coercion.''

The impact on the mind could be even more baleful. The ambition of rationally reforming society tended to minimize the importance of the inner life, shrinking the conception of the mind. All dark desires, untamable impulses, ambivalent feelings and contradictory thoughts would then be considered failures of the outside world, imperfections in the social order that could be controlled or legislated away. In this way, liberalism risked evolving into doctrinaire puritanism -- or worse.